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Thanks everyone for coming out! For the next 3 weeks, we’ll be Playing and Rating the games you created.You NEED ratings to get a score at the end. Play and Rate games to help others find your game.We’ll be announcing Ludum Dare 36’s August date alongside the results.

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I didn’t post any updates here during the compo, I didn’t feel like it. But you can check out my progress at my website. I’ll crosspost the post mortem.

Last Ludum Dare I had to drop out due to personal reasons. Thankfully nothing happened the past weekend. So that’s one of the things that went right. 😉

Things that went right

– libgdx, if you’re a Java developer, check it out. I used Slick2D during my four entries before this one and I was satisfied with it. But libgdx is so much cooler. I tried a quick tutorial on Friday eve and jumped right in on Saturday. It worked out great.

– once again, I kept the scope of my game small: infinite runner with minimal input

– Android, this goes with libgdx, but deserves its own point. Porting it to Android is so easy and it takes no extra work at all.

– Making the jar/apk. When I used Slick2D I had to add the dependencies in myself as well as the resources. I don’t know if it could be done differently, I guess Maven could come into play here, but libgdx does all that for you. So once again, in case you didn’t get it: LIBGDX

Things that went okay

– my code. I tried maintaining an as clean as possible codebase. But I dropped that notion. BUT contrary to the previous entries, the code I had written during the “clean” phase of my Ludum entry has saved me from entirely changing up the code when I added different enemies. Adding new enemies now isn’t a hassle, while with previous entries I… well, let’s not talk about it…

Things that went wrong

– The theme. I don’t know why anyone thinks Minimalism is a good theme, because it isn’t. I was really rooting for anything related to Death/Afterlife because I had an awesome idea that I really wanted to use. But there’s always next time right?

– Ludum Dare isn’t really a challenge anymore. I can comfortably finish up the game by Saturday night/Sunday morning and use Sunday afternoon to nag about how I have to do art and use the Sunday evening to create bad-to-mediocre art. This is either because the game I made now is reasonably easy to implement or because of the theme. But, for the next Ludum Dare, I am going to try to make a more interesting concept, a bit more difficult, so that there will be this tension to make the deadline.

Ideas for next Ludum

– make it more difficult for myself. Ludum is a self-imposed challenge. It can’t hurt to make it harder on myself.

– perhaps enter the Jam with some friends or fellow Ludum participants. (might be a good thing for the art)

– practice art (an ever returning item)

I look forward to rating more of your games. If you want me to rate yours, drop me a message or tweet at @MyMilkedEek

– Java :
IntelliJ IDEA, I became an evangelist for this IDE, get it now, I believe it’s still on sale!
Slick2d + JBox2D OR libgdx, depends on how much practice I get with libgdx, music especially.

– Graphics :
Paint.NET again, I think.

– Music/SFX :
I’m going to try to improve my top score (pun intended) and go all out here. Been practicing a lot. Instruments at my disposal: Double bass, classical guitar, electric guitar, keyboard and some minor instruments (recorder, harmonica, etc…)
BFXR/SFXR, whichever one is the most complete of the two, I always seem to forget.

Groovy, groovy is awesome. Quick prototyping, quick feedback from the mechanics. After reading the theme and doing some quick brainstorming, I had tested 2-3 concepts within the hour. Why I took the less action-packed of them all is another bullet point.

Time management. I think I spent a whole lot less time than my other two entries. I made a loose schedule based on 3 parts (simple mechanics, advanced mechanics, art) and when I started a part I would make a tight schedule.

Music. Even though there are some Linux issues with it, I like the music I recorded for my entry. If you have the time to spare and there wasn’t any music in my game on your platform. Open the sound files and listen to them. I tried to give it a nice summer vibe and I did ok, I think.

The theme. I didn’t think evolution would get picked, so I didn’t think about some ideas before the compo started. I spent the first half hour staring at my wall trying to come up with a good angle. I didn’t, so I just went with what seemed most feasible and finished that.

I was going to do a mouse oriented game. The only mouse action in the game is closing it…

What went horribly wrong

Sunday afternoon I made a jar to give to caranha to test out some stuff. I then realized it would not run. not even on my own machine. And the issue was with Groovy. So fuck that, I thought, I wasn’t going to spend hours trying to find the solution to this: I ported it to Java in record time. Who would’ve thought that the thing that was making me progress so fast would be the thing holding me back?

Conclusions

Groovy is good for prototyping, I’ll probably won’t use it in the next Ludum for the actual game code. Although I missed a lot of features while porting to Java. I just love Groovy.

Setting out reasonable goals concerning mechanics is really reassuring and made me enjoy the coding a lot more. Last Ludum I was frantically coding my game and leaving bugs everywhere. I haven’t looked at that codebase because it makes grown men cry.

Clean code is possible in Ludum. It’s not as clean as it could be, but it’s not confusing to read or quickfixes upon quickfixes upon bugs like my previous entry.

If you want to incorporate some features, I wanted a mouse oriented game, make sure you know how to before the compo starts. I didn’t bother looking it up, because I would lose precious time. In hindsight, I did have the time to look it up, but better safe than sorry. In other words: know your tools.

I decided on my idea of the thumb. Tiny Thumb is born. Got some basic stuff out of the way. Right now I got to run to do some administration (adult life sucks monkey balls) but after that I’ll be back.

And for the more curious people: https://code.google.com/p/mme-ludum-23/

Seriously Tiny world? I thought I woke up earlier and read the theme was Parallel universes, but apparently my sleepy brain tricked me into believing that. -sigh- Fast forward. Three hours into the competition I woke up and this is the theme. Well… First things first.

I have about 4-6 ideas on paper.

A little kid on a train sticks his hand out of the window and you guessed it, his thumb gets cut off. The thumb, lying in the grass, is now on a quest to get reunited with its former place, or is he going to have an identity crisis and choose for independence?
Genre: RPG, Plattformer or Action/Adventure

You are a PC. Or to put it better: the intent of the game would be to deliver input bits as fast as possible to the output. While doing so the bit (or bits) might have to be processed to acquire a desired output, such as going through the ALU to get a calculation on two input bits/bytes before going to the screen output.
Genre: Obviously a Puzzle game

An ant is being chased by his love rival after he got caught smooching the queen. He’s now running for his life dodging rain drops, falling cigarette buts and gum.
Genre: Score Attack

TinySimCity/TinyCivilization
Genre: RTS or TBS

Going to go away from keyboard for a bit and do some art and some basic concepts. Ahem… “art”.

Second time entrant. I finished my game the last time, but to be fair, it wasn’t a gem. The setup this time:

– Java, slick2d, but I picked IntelliJ over Eclipse this time.
– Paint.NET, solid choice last time, I doubt it would disappoint me this time round.
– Tiled, map editor, go check it out. Slick integrated this awesomely.
– sfxr for the basic sound effects.
– music is still up in the air, suggestions are always welcome, might go audacity, who knows

Basically the same setup as last time. BUT

This time I took some time to learn a bit more about the frameworks and tools I’m going to use and I’m really stoked. Gogogo.